Tag: Takeya Mizugaki

Remember last week when we went apeshit over MMA sites purporting to have full-fight video highlights but not actually delivering?

In case you don’t remember, loads of site posted “full fight video highlights” of the fight between Mark Hunt and Roy Nelson. The only problem was the highlights were missing the most important part: The knockout.

The highlight video above is much better. While it cuts away right before the fight is stopped, it shows just enough of Conor McGregor‘s first-round KO of Dustin Poirier for you to get the idea of how it went down.

And do you know what else is awesome? Pretty much all the other “full fight video highlights” from UFC 178 are the same. They actually show the parts you want to see. Chalk up another victory for the Potato Nation. It seems our irreverence is finally starting to make a difference in the world of MMA SEO clickbaiting.

Watch the other highlights after the jump, and be sure to enjoy your 40-seconds of violence and anodyne commentary!

All in all, the card is certainly worth your money, although it might be hard convincing casual fans of that. (“Wait…Anthony Johnson is fighting *who*? Does this Chris Carano guy trane with the Gracies?”) The full UFC 178 lineup is below…

NOTHING has made me more excited in a long time than hearing a fight date from @seanshelby. Ask him tho-cuz I cnt release it. #comingsoon

Upon reading this, you started scouring the internet and/or harassing Sean Shelby to learn the details of Cruz’s fight, which eventually led you to this ESPN article claiming that Cruz had been booked against Takeya Mizugaki at UFC 178.

This news likely filled you with joy, the kind of sweet, overwhelming joy that all but disabled your ability to think logically. Which is why I’m here to rain on your parade, to piss in your oatmeal. To tell you that Mr. Cruz is setting you up, is setting us all up, for an inevitable downfall. Our hopes of a Dominick Cruz comeback are about to be dashed, so please, let’s all just calm the f*ck down and treat this fight booking with as much trepidation as humanly possible.

In addition to “The Baron” defending his 135-pound title against Team Alpha Male standout TJ Dillashaw, and Cormier looking to earn a title shot with a win over legendary slugger Dan Henderson, tonight’s card will feature a high-level welterweight bout between Robbie Lawler and Jake Ellenberger (who are both coming off losses). Plus, Takeya “Teriyaki” Mizugaki and Francisco Rivera will attempt to build on their win streaks in the bantamweight division, and Jamie Varner kicks off the broadcast against fellow fan-friendly lightweight James Krause.

BG will be sticking round-by-round updates from the UFC 173 main card after the jump beginning at 10 p.m. ET / 7 p.m. PT. Refresh the page every few minutes for the latest updates, and follow us on twitter for extra analysis and yuk-yuks. Thanks for coming.

Though the main card was high-quality in terms of entertainment value, the prelims were a dull affair. The two highlights: Ben Wall walking out dressed like a furry before getting KO’d in under a minute, and a great scrap between Nam Phan and Takeya Mizugaki that saw the latter’s hand raised via unanimous decision.

The main card started with one of the most technical, evenly matched women’s fights the UFC has ever had. Longtime fighter Julie Kedzie met newcomer Bethe Correia. Too bad that FOX Sports 1 blacked out for many viewers, cutting off the first half of the contest. Furthermore, Greg Jackson’s Matt Serra-level shouting eclipsed some of the action. It’s hard to appreciate what’s going on when all you can hear is Jackson screaming about how amazing a mediocre combo was in order to sway the inept judges.

Dylan Andrews and Clint Hester met next. It looked like they weren’t going to continue the card’s momentum, but they pulled through. The bout had spurts of inactivity, but for every dragged-out clinch or half-guard hangout session, there was at least one fiery exchange or big hit. The fight was stopped in between the second and third rounds on account of a shoulder injury, giving Hester the victory.

Check out the results of the co-main event, main event, and for the TL;DR rundown of the card after the jump.

So BG is gone this week, I assume to yet another wedding, because once he bought the tuxedo he was determined to get the mileage out of it. Seriously, he’s got the whole bit: natty little straight cane with the white tips, monocle, top hat, the whole nine. It’s dashing, but apparently it’s expensive as hell. That or he’s running some kind of scheme where he collects disposable cameras and plastic champagne flutes? What the fuck are you building in there, Goldstein?

So anyway, I’m poking around his office here at CP headquarters, kick over a box of CagePotato Hall of Fame t-shirts, and damn if i didn’t stumble over the ol’ arbitrariest of MMA supercomputers: the Potato Index.

Turns out it’s been hooked up this whole time, so I decided to pull up the numbers on UFC’s Fight Night 27, just for old times’ sake.

The Octagon Girls +16
The new Octagon Girls are lovely. Chrissy Blair is the archetypal California Girl; think Christie Brinkley in a Ferrari, but blonder. And the new brunette one getting tattoos exactly like Brittney Palmer’s was a nice touch.

Kansas City fighters + 42Zak Cummings [+19] and Jason High [+23] both picked up their first UFC wins with good-looking performances. Jason High had previously lost to Erick Silva in June and Charlie Brennamen back in 2010, mostly because Joe Silva likes to call High on short notice for not-easy fights. The Kansas City Bandit gets a big bump with a quick win.

Abel Trujillo +11
Trujillo picks up the best kind of No Contest: the kind that comes from a foul that is both uber-agressive and debatable. Attacking grounded fighters with knees will always stir the passions; if Trujillo were a savvy marketer, he would start coming to the cage in a Hannibal mask and a straight jacket. A straight jacket covered in sponsor patches. Dana White would get a visible boner.

Roger Bowling -5
Unfortunately, according to (arbitrary) opinion, it’s better to take the loss in the cage and get the NC declared later. But enjoy your short-term memory and normal brain function. (Pussy.)

If I were to have told you before this event that a FUEL TV caliber card will have seven out of nine fights go the distance, it is doubtful that many of you would have watched UFC on FUEL 6. If I were to have reminded you that because the fights were live from Macau, China, you’d have to wake up at 9 a.m. ET to watch said card, I’m willing to bet we would have had a pretty vacant liveblog this morning. It isn’t often that a card with so many decisions is worth waking up early for, but UFC on FUEL 6 proved to be an exception.

Expectations weren’t exactly high for the evening’s main event, a middleweight contest between Rich Franklin and Cung Le. With neither fighter in the title picture – or even near it – and forty year old Cung Le bloodletting his foot just one week before the fight, this fight had a very high bust-potential. Most of us assumed that Ace would exit the cage with his first victory at middleweight since 2008, and that we wouldn’t be missing much if we started our afternoon nap a little early.

Instead, Cung Le gave us a Knockout of the Year candidate, countering a leg kick with a devastating right hand that secured the victory just 2:17 into the fight. Being the only knockout on the card, Le took home the $40k Knockout of the Night award, but even if every other fight ended in a knockout it’d be hard not to award such a brutal finish the honor. If you happened to miss it, here it is in all of its animated GIF glory:

Pictured: Their approximate reactions to finding out “garbage-ass” was a real phrase.

One week ago, Ben published an article voicing concerns over how weak UFC 151′s main card was. But it was cool, because Jon Jones vs. Dan Henderson was going to be such an awesome fight. Two days ago, Jones vs. Henderson was scrapped and UFC 151 was canceled. [Ed. note: Damn, two days? Feels like we've been covering this forever.] Even though most of us acknowledged that the cancellation of the event was at least partially due to the garbage-assness of pretty much the entire card, we were too busy talking about Jon Jones ducking Chael Sonnen/Sonnen attempting to troll his way into an immediate title shot (depending on which side of the fence you’re on) to really delve into the issue. But now that the UFC has started to transplant the canceled UFC 151 fights to other cards, it’s time to take a closer look at that issue for a moment.

The bouts from UFC 151 are quickly being rescheduled for different cards, with UFC on FX 5 taking a significant chunk of them. As we covered in yesterday’s link dump, UFC 151′s planned co-main event, Jake Ellenberger vs. Jay Hieron, will now be the co-main event of UFC On FX 5. This won’t be the only fight from UFC 151′s main card that will now be padding UFC on FX 5 – Dennis Hallman vs. Thiago Tavares, Danny Castillo vs. Michael Johnson and Shane Roller vs. Jacob Volkmann will be moved to this card as well. UFC on Fuel TV 6 will now be featuring fights between bantamweights Takeya Mizugaki and Jeff Hougland and flyweights John Lineker and Yasuhiro Urushitani, while Kyle Noke and Charlie Brenneman will do the man dance on the undercard of UFC 152.

In case you haven’t noticed, it’s worth mentioning that absolutely none of these fights – three of which were on the pay-per-view portion of UFC 151, mind you – have made it to the main card of an upcoming pay-per-view. Now I understand that financially, most fighters who were expecting a paycheck on September 1 simply can’t afford to wait until November’s UFC 154 to fight again. But that’s not the issue: The issue is that the UFC could afford to move pay-per-view quality fights *makes this hand gesture* to free television in the first place.

In honor of Urijah Faber‘s interim bantamweight title bid at UFC 149, we thought it would be a good time to give the California Kid some love, through the magical medium of MMA GIFs. Check ‘em out some of our favorite Faber moments after the jump, and let us know if you think he’ll be picking up a new belt this weekend — or if he’ll go out in a blaze of glory.

Admit it: When Mark Hunt first caught Cheick Kongo with a counter left, you were excited. When Hunt chased Kongo down and dropped him with a series of fight-ending straight rights, you cheered. No matter how much money you bet on Kongo to win, you couldn’t help but buy into the feel-good story that has been Mark Hunt’s UFC run. To see the same Mark Hunt who only earned a shot in the UFC due to the PRIDE buyout- the guy who Dana White offered to pay to just walk away from the UFC before being submitted by Sean McCorkle- thoroughly outclass one of the heavyweight division’s best kickboxers is a testament to his newfound dedication to the sport. The fact that he’s thirty seven years old only makes it all the more remarkable.

Mark Hunt improves to 8-7, marking the first time he’s had a winning record in the sport since his record was 5-4 in 2008. Although his hopes for either a title shot or a fight on next week’s Australia card are both pretty optimistic (to put it mildly), Hunt clearly demonstrated that he’s ready for stiffer competition. As for Cheick Kongo, this loss shouldn’t hurt his standing with the UFC- he was already a gatekeeper to begin with. We already knew that he wasn’t a serious contender for the heavyweight championship- the way he was outclassed by Mark Hunt’s striking and his inability to get Hunt on the ground proved it.